HOWLEY: Remembering the man who walked into the newsroom

He walked into the newsroom at the Lansing State Journal in the spring of 1952, fresh from the Army and an unexpected detour in his career.

He didn’t walk out until November 2000.

One of the first things I remember was him walking through the door at lunchtime, sitting down at the table, and opening up the paper, still warm and smelling slightly of fresh ink.

The State Journal at the time was an afternoon paper, like most papers up until the 1970s. They put out an edition at about 11 a.m. for the lunchtime crowd, and another one in late afternoon for the home delivery customers.

So after the lunchtime edition went out, Dad grabbed one off the press and brought it home for both him and my mother to dissect before he went back for the afternoon shift.

See, Mom was a journalist too. She had worked at several papers around the state before they got married in June 1953.

They had both been editors at The State News at Michigan State (then College), but their academic careers didn’t overlap -- Dad had graduated in 1949 and then invited back to the hospitality of the U.S. Army for a couple years -- but when he was mustered out in 1952, he came back to school to visit some old friends at a party, it turned out she was part of the crowd, and, as I was told, the rest was history.

At any rate they hit it off, and so I was fated to grow up in a house of journalists. So every day at noon, Mom and Dad would talk over the day’s paper. What were the big stories of the day, why was this story going here, why was that story going there, who the heck wrote that crazy headline, all of that good stuff.

From the very beginning, they decided to include me in the conversations. I started to ask what this word meant, what that word meant, who’s this guy, who’s that guy, and what do headlines like “KENNEDY, KHRUSHCHEV TO PARLEY” mean? As a result I was probably one of the very few 4-year-olds in the world who knew what the Cuban Missile Crisis was about. (Well, kind of, anyway.)

So 15 or so years later when I went to college, I did NOT want to go into journalism. In the Seventies, being rebellious, independent, mavericky and smart-alecky was very much in vogue, so while I figured I would go into something communication-related, I decided I was NOT going into journalism and follow in the ‘family footsteps.’. So I declared my major as radio-TV production, only to find out I had the proverbial face for radio and voice for newsprint. And, as part of the course requirements, I had to take some journalism classes anyway, and found out I seemed to know most of it already.

After taking a couple years off in the seemingly-obligatory mid-college identity crisis (driving wreckers and pumping gas), I came back to school and said, “maybe it’s time to buckle down.” And as time went on it seemed to hit me that following in my parents’ footsteps might not be such a bad thing after all.

That was 30 years ago, just about, and launched me on the long and winding road which I’ve been on ever since.

In the 1980s it seemed that 30-year careers might be par for the course, not only in journalism but in American society in general.

Most of my parents’ friends had been in their jobs 20 years or longer; it was unheard of to hop around through a dozen jobs or more in a career. There seemed to be value to experience and commitment to doing a job right over a span of decades. But that was in the day of dead-tree newspapers, when teevee news came on two or three times a day and a computer was a hunk of electronic machinery the size of an aircraft carrier built into a warehouse-size building on a college campus. Things aren’t the same as they were in 1983 or 1953, for that matter. Names change and so do the games. Adapt and survive. Dad knew the score; he started in the days of rubber cement, hot-lead type, newsrooms choked with cigar smoke, and the last pages he laid out were on an Apple computer.

But I still remember the man who walked into the newsroom for nearly 50 years.

Joe Howley was a sports writer and copy editor for the Daily Tribune. Contact him at JJHinMI@aol.com.